It’s the time of year to think about growing food. You can get a lot of food out of a small amount of space once you get the hang of it. But this is a learned skill. The worse our economy gets, the more you are going to wish you knew how to grow your own, and the best way to find out how is to get started now if you haven’t already.

Those with no backyard to dig up have options. Haines community garden has plots, or go help at Mosquito Lake, which is bigger and is communal, so you aren’t trying to do it all yourself. You’ll learn a lot and have fun. Both have a playground for children.

Another option is container growing. Old 5-gallon buckets are ideal, but almost anything will do, including cardboard boxes lined with plastic — just make sure your container has holes in the bottom for drainage.  

Fill your container with a mixture of whatever you can find: rotted wood from dead trees, maybe some soil mix from the hardware store, seaweed, rotted sawdust, compost. You can use dirt as part of the mix, but not all; by itself in a container, it will pack down hard.  

Add a couple handfuls of lime or ashes and maybe some dry fertilizer. I fill the bottoms of mine with composted chicken manure.

One of the most reliable crops is potatoes. Get seed potatoes (the hardware store should have them) rather than those from the grocery store, which are often treated with chemicals to prevent sprouting. Set them out for several days or weeks until they begin sprouting, and then set them in their buckets. Be gentle and don’t break off the sprouts. Cover with a couple inches of the dirt mixture, water them and keep them in a reasonably warm place until you see leaves. Then set them out in the sun, keep watering, and add more soil mix as the summer progresses. The bucket should be pretty well filled by the end.

To harvest, dump the bucket into a wheelbarrow. Save the dirt, you’ll want it next year.

Green beans and carrots also grow very well in containers. 

Carrots need to be thinned carefully. They simply won’t grow if overcrowded.  Many other crops do beautifully in containers too. For instance, lettuce and other salad greens and herbs can be particularly successful in pots. And it’s very nice to have them handy.  Locally grown tomatoes are hard to find; you just about have to grow your own.  

Personally, I seem to have lost my green thumb with tomatoes, but that shouldn’t stop you. Cherry tomatoes seem to be the most reliable.  

I always add seeds for nasturtiums, sweet peas or other flowers. You can eat nasturtiums (not sweet peas), but I mostly grow them because I like them.

I’ve never grown zucchinis or other summer squash in containers. They’re quite rampageous, but they do very well in the ground. A summer without them would be sad, even unthinkable.  

My favorites are the beautiful little yellow crooknecks with green ends, but they’re all delicious.  Go with vegetable infanticide here, 6 or 8 inches long or even smaller.  

Like potatoes, you can make a full meal with just zucchinis, a bit of tomato and some cheese, maybe an egg. Unless you are a teenager, in which case it would be just an appetizer before the hamburger and whatnot.

Plant sales should be coming up, which are always worth going to.  You can save yourself a lot of time and trouble buying things like tomato seedlings, and the sales are a lot of fun. 

A great place to buy flower seedlings too, and what’s summer without lots of pansies?

Sally McGuire is a 40-year resident of the Chilkat Valley who raised four healthy children in Fairbanks and Haines on a budget, but always with an eye to real food and producing as much as possible of what the family ate. The column Eating Well in the Chilkat Valley is focused on making affordable meals with what’s local, seasonal and available at the grocery store.